The history of Italy can be characterized as two periods of unity separated by a millennium and a half of division. In the 6th–3rd centuries BCE the Italian city of Rome conquered peninsular Italy; in the following centuries this empire spread to dominate the Mediterranean and Western Europe. This Roman Empire would go on to define much of European history, leaving a mark on culture, politics and society that outlasted its military and political one. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay After the Italian part of the Roman Empire decayed and "fell" in the 5th century (an event that no one at the time realized was all that significant), Italy was the target of numerous invasions and the previously united region it divided into several smaller bodies, including the Papal States, governed by the Catholic Pope. Numerous powerful, commercially-oriented city-states emerged, including Florence, Venice, and Genoa; these incubated the Renaissance. Italy, and its smaller states, also went through phases of foreign domination. These smaller states were the incubation ground of the Renaissance, which once again changed Europe massively, and owed much to competing states seeking to outdo each other in glory. The unification and independence movements for Italy developed increasingly louder voices in the nineteenth century after Napoleon. created a short-lived Kingdom of Italy. A war between Austria and France in 1859 allowed several small states to merge with Piedmont; a turning point was reached and in 1861 a Kingdom of Italy was formed, which grew in 1870 - when the Papal States united - to cover almost all of what we now call Italy. The kingdom was subverted when Mussolini took power as a fascist dictator, and although he was initially skeptical of Hitler, Mussolini took Italy into World War II rather than risk losing it. This caused his downfall. Modern Italy is now a democratic republic, and has been since the modern constitution came into force in 1948. This followed a referendum in 1946 which voted to abolish the previous monarchy by twelve million votes to ten. Describe the nation's culture during the early 1800s: (At least one paragraph.) Italian society after unification and through much of the liberal period was sharply divided along class, linguistic, regional, and social lines. The North-South divide is still present today. On September 20, 1870, the military forces of the King of Italy overthrew what remained of the Papal State, conquering in particular the city of Rome. The following year the capital was moved from Florence to Rome. For the next 59 years after 1870, the Church denied the legitimacy of the Italian king's rule over Rome, which it claimed rightfully belonged to the Papal States. In 1929 the controversy was resolved by the Lateran Pacts, with which the King recognized the Vatican City as an independent state and paid a large sum of money to compensate the Church for the loss of the Papal State. Liberal governments generally followed a policy of limiting the role of the Roman Catholic Church and its clergy in the confiscation of ecclesiastical lands by the state. Similar policies were supported by anti-clerical and secular movements such as republicanism, socialism, anarchism, freemasonry, lazarism and Protestantism. Common cultural traits in Italy in this period were social conservative in nature, including a strong belief in the family as an institution and in patriarchal values. In other areas, Italian culture was divided: the aristocrats and upper-class families in Italy in this